Film Catalogue :

Israeli films about “normal” life

Big quotation marks around “normal”, because the word is laced with a certain amount of irony. Without diminishing their essential Israeli/Jewish character, it’s just that these are films which I can imagine to a greater or lesser extent being (re-)made in another, non-Israeli, non-Jewish context, with whatever necessary tweaks. One of them - The Kindergarten Teacher - was indeed repackaged four years later in the USA. The irony is that these include films about life in the Israeli army, which is a very normal part of most people’s life in Israel, but which is of course not at all a normal life when compared to countries such as my own with a fully professional standing army.

Note - I probably don’t need to mention that YouTube accounts come and go, and that the site changes all the time as the Google billionaires tighten their grip on “our” internet. In other words, I did all the research I could to find trailers, clips, interviews, and in some cases the whole movie. No idea if the people who uploaded the movies were in line with copyright or otherwise. In the case of some Turkish and many Iranian films it seems quite common to find the whole film online, and in the Iranian case it makes plenty of sense that banned filmmakers put their films out wherever people can possibly find them. On this side of the wall, I’m not sure. I just found what I found. As a result, it is more than likely that some of the links will go nowhere if you’re trying them months or even years after I added them. Maybe I’ll find a way to crawl over them eventually and auto-update. Whatever - the world is mad. Anyway, if you have any constructive suggestions about films that deserve to be added to the lists, and which I’ve neglected, feel free to write in the comments below.

Israeli films about Religious Communities and Minorities

In contrast to the list of supposedly “normal” films, I couldn’t really envisage any of the films on this list being remade or rehashed in Hollywood or elsewhere. Of course some of them - most notably Live and Become, a French production with a Romanian director - have input from outside of Israel, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re very very specific to the place. That probably makes them harder to get into for anyone who doesn’t know a bit about the history and/or the sociology. It may just be a hard fact that to understand what’s going on in these films you need to have at least a little bit of prior understanding of Jewish traditions, not only the history, and some broad awareness of the incredibly complex kaleidoscope of Jewish identities.

Most of the films are about the tensions within and between the Ashkenazi↗︎ and Sephardi↗︎/Mizrahi↗︎ communities. Several of them - Kadosh, Fill The Void, Tikkun and Ushpizin look inside the closed world of the Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox, a milieu which is little understood outside Israel and diaspora Jewish communities, and one which stands apart from the Arab-Israeli conflict (or perhaps let’s say rather that it tries very hard to stand apart from the conflict, and that that leads to another kind of conflict). On the other side of the ledger, the Sephardi/Mizrahi communities are depicted in God’s Neighbours, The Women’s Balcony and the Vivian trilogy.

However, there is one other outlier on the list - A Borrowed Identity (aka The Dancing Arabs), a film which adresses the cultural dilemmas around integration, faced by Arabs who grow up within Israeli-Jewish society.

Films about War - Israeli-made, or seen from the Israeli/Jewish viewpoint

All but two of these films were made in Israel. I added the clarification about the Israeli “viewpoint” simply because two of them - Golda and Shoshana, both made in 2023 - are in fact US/UK and UK/Italian productions that look at the conflicts from the point of view of a Jewish/Israeli protagonist. Both are biopics, but the name of Shoshana Borochov↗︎ will be far less familiar to anyone who knows anything about the history of Israel than that of Golda Meir↗︎. The director of Golda, and several of the actors in it, are Israeli, aside from Helen Mirren↗︎ in the lead role. Shoshana, from the famous British director Michael Winterbottom↗︎, is a valuable piece - pretty much the only film that I’ve found which looks at the pre-1948 British Mandate period, Perhaps it’s not a great surprise that it’s my people who take the greatest interest in this, and that neither Israelis nor Arabs appear to have delved into making films about it. No surprise at all that they don’t go back to 1918, 1929 or 1936. I know that they won’t listen to me, but I think they would be wiser to do so. Stopping the search at 1948 isn’t enough.

After watching so many really interesting films about this endlessly complicated conflict and these kaleidoscopic communities of people, I’ll say in brutal honesty that I didn’t actually think too much of Golda. I feel the same way about at least a couple more of the films on this list. It seemed to me that some of them - for instance the film shown immediately to the right of this paragraph, Image Of Victory - were made more for the sake of myth-making, in my opinion, than with the goal of asking serious questions about what I recently heard the notable journalist Thomas Friedman very neatly describing as nearly one hundred years of “war, timeout, war, timeout, war, timeout….” However, myth-making, good or bad, is part of history and nation-building, so the making of those films and the motivations for their making will need to be analysed here at some point.

The trio of films in the middle of the list, however - Beaufort, Waltz With Bashir and Lebanon - are all extraordinarily honest pieces of work, which ask profound existential questions about that very situation. Also, Tantura is a documentary about an Israeli who paid a very heavy price for asking too many of uncomfortable questions about 1948 for the liking of many of his compatriots. I’ve included Yossi & Jagger on this list, as well as on the list of “normal” films, because it has quite a lot to say about both Israeli society and the state of endless war.

Films about the Occupation

With only a couple of exceptions that fall a bit short, these are all very hard-hitting works. Tough questions will be asked, obviously. As with Yossi & Jagger on the previous list, I’ve got Eytan Fox’s The Bubble on this list, while also including it in the list of films about “normal” life, because it’s the film that brings the Occupation “home” more sharply than any other that I’ve seen. Note that several of these are documentary films, and that some of them are publicly available on YouTube (just try the links to find out!)

Diaspora Jewish films

Some of these films, for example Disobedience and Menashe, complement the list of films about religious communities within Israel, and the two films with Baghdad in the title shed light on issues of Sephardi↗︎ and Mizrahi↗︎ identity in the Jewish State. Of course not all of them are about religion, but more about Jewish identity in the Diaspora. Thankfully, some of them offer a little light relief from the horror and the darkness of the films in the two lists immediately above and below.

Films about the Sho’ah / Holocaust

As I already wrote about in my introductory post, I’m only including films about the Holocaust which got all the way under my skin. There were a whole gaggle of films made in the nineties and noughties which were subject to quite a lot of media hype, but which missed the mark in my opinion. I’m not therefore including some well-known films like Schindler’s List, The Pianist and Life is Beautiful, among others. They’re not at all bad films, and obviously you can include them if you want. It’s a very hard subject, to state the blindingly obvious, and choosing one’s “preferred” films is a very very personal choice. There’s absolutely no reason that the films that resonate for me have to resonate with everyone else. There are also a few quite bad films about the Holocaust (looking at you, for example, The Boy In the Striped Pajamas), which only deserve mention for how badly they fail at the subject.

Not all of the films on this list are about the Holocaust itself. Three of them are about the echos of those events, which - even as the last criminals and their victims pass away - still do of course resonate in the madness of today’s Middle East. Sidney Lumet's↗︎ The Pawnbroker (based on the novel of the same name) was one of the first films to investigate the dark and complex psychology of a Holocaust survivor, and I suppose one of the first that I saw as a teenager, along perhaps with Sophie’s Choice (starring Meryl Streep in one of her earlier breakout roles, I guess). I didn’t include Sophie’s Choice on the list, but again this decision is not because I thought it was a bad movie. It was just a very long time ago, and I may well include it after watching the film again.

The memories depicted in The Pawnbroker and others are cynically exploited by some (if you look at few of my posts you won’t need to try too hard to guess who I mean) to justify the worst impunity and abuse of universal human rights, but these are of course memories nonetheless which we can’t pretend to be irrelevant to the prickly psychology of Israelis as a people. Plan A is a very recently made film which surprised me with a story that I had absolutely no knowledge of. It’s the true story of a band of Holocaust survivors who organised to take systematic revenge against the German people in the years between the end of the War and the establishment of Israel. Vengeance. Sounds familiar, right? I wasn’t actually expecting it to be as good as it turned out to be. Well worth checking out.

Walk On Water is the THIRD Eytan Fox film which finds itself on two lists. That guy must be onto something. Of course it’s true that every second Israeli film might somehow or other reference the Holocaust, but here once again Fox has the special knack of plugging the external issue (or rather, in this case the deeply felt historical issue) directly into contemporary Israeli existence, and that is why the film belongs on both the so-called “normal” list and this explicitly far from normal list.

Biblical and Zionist Mythology

This might be one of my riskiest moves, especially given that I’m placing this section directly after the Shoah/Holocaust section. That’s partly just the organic development of the site. The thought to add this section has come as a long delayed afterthought, more than a year after the other sections. It’s been created in parallel with two sections on the other side, relating to Orientalist films and what I call “worthy Western” films about the Middle East. Some would argue, and they do, that the Holocaust is a logical terminus at the end of humanity and humanism, and that no words should follow that. It’s a statement that can be understood on an emotional level, and even on some kind of artistic-mimetic level, but on a pragmatic level it’s just not true. Humanity still existed after World War Two and the Holocaust - morally more besmirched than ever, but it was still there, and history continued.

In any case, I do not think that it’s a controversial statement to say that the Holocaust is an ideological cornerstone of the State of Israel. On June 5, 1982, as he launched the Lebanon invasion, Menachem Begin↗︎ told the Israeli Cabinet: “The alternative to fighting is Treblinka, and we have resolved that there would be no Treblinkas.” There are thousands more examples that we can analyse. It’s a more contentious statement to say that the moral force of rhetorical deployment of Holocaust memory to justify Israel’s excesses is eroding day by day, but there you go - I’ve said it, and I’m hardly on my own. In Begin’s time it was still harder to push back - not so much by now. There’s no point fantasising about an alternate history in which the genocide didn’t happen, in which democratic international socialism triumphed, with the Jewish Bund↗︎ as an avant garde element of that happy evolution for humanity. Imagining an alternative UN vote in 1947 on the recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine↗︎ means imagining a completely different story in general. There’s one film that logically belongs on both of these lists. That’s Plan A, which most obviously examines and bridges that gap between 1945 and 1948.

Let’s be very very careful about language here, making sure to clarify the difference between “myth” and “mythology”. I’m using the word “mythology” to speak about the selection of narratives that affirm an ideological paradigm. Especially with relation to the Holocaust narrative, that’s important to clarify. It is of course wicked to claim that it’s a myth made up to justify Zionism. However, founding mythology is important. In the case of Israel, it’s stories that are told about heroic resistance, noble victories against all odds, and pure intentions. According to these narratives, what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 was mostly their own fault. Maybe it’s a bit more complicated than that - what do you think? One of the films on this list, Image of Victory, is very much that kind of founding myth movie. In contrast with that, you see to the right of this paragraph the poster for Tantura, an Israeli documentary film that questions the standard Zionist narratives about what happened in 1948.

Clearly, then, apart from the Holocaust, the other area with which we’re overlapping is this section about Israel's multiple wars since 1948, which includes Image of Victory and Tantura, along with two films by Amos Gitai, one about 1948 and the other about 1973. Gitai is a bit of a puzzle for me. He made one really amazing film - Kadosh - and for that reason I have to count him as a great director. But all his other films that I’ve seen are just, honestly, a bit boring. That includes Kedma, the film about 1948, which I’ve marked as “watched”, but the truth is that I think I gave up halfway. I haven’t got around to watching Kippur at the time of creating this section. Not sure when that will be. Notice that I haven’t added the films about the war in Lebanon here. That’s because they don’t conform comfortably with the standard narrative.

The waters get even more murky here. This is where the overlap with the Orientalist section comes in. We’re looking at Western (mainly Hollywood) films that affirm the Zionist narrative, and there’s a period of particular interest to investigate there - in the fifties and early sixties there was a wave of epic films set in the ancient and classical periods, such as Spartacus↗︎, Quo Vadis↗︎, and The Fall of the Roman Empire↗︎. None of those deals especially with Jewish or Israelite themes, but there are two very influential epics that were very much about that, both of them starring Charlton Heston, and I think it could be interesting to think about how much those two films fed into Christian Zionist narratives that became so very influential among American evangelicals in the late 20th and (especially) the early 21st century.

A final very tentative interrogation - to what extent did some of those Hollywood films films reflect, consciously or unconsciously, a process of self-orientalisation in the first decades of the State of Israel, at the time when it could still legitimately be seen as a mostly European entity on Middle Eastern land? What is certain, and still very little understood outside Israel, is that the country moved on from any such identity crisis some time ago. Farewell Baghdad (AKA The Dove Flyer) deals with the other half of the post-1945-48 founding mythology, the story of the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews who were forced (mainly, at least) to flee their homes in the Middle East around the time that the state came into existence.